Autograph Letter - Arrigo Boito

‘You can inform the distinguished Mr Lanza that I have been writing libretti for several years, and that is the truth’; also informing his correspondent that his ‘flu is almost gone.

The seventeen-year-old Arrigo Boito, still a pupil at the Milan Conservatory, writes with no small amount of youthful bluster of his illustrious career as a librettist: indeed, it is in this guise that Boito – who is remembered also as a composer, poet and critic – is perhaps best known today, through the libretti he created for Verdi, notably for Otello and Falstaff.